I recently took up photography but, while I have taken a fair number of pictures, I had not until today done much with them. since the point of taking pictures is to look at them I decided to set up a flickr account and upload them there. I've only got some of what I've been working on up right now but if anyone has any interest it can be found at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jvanstone/

if anyone has any thoughts, comments or suggestions I would be happy to hear them. I am very much in the learning stages and the input is welcome, thank you.

Sitting here in the sunlight, in the intermittent moments when it shines through, it seems somewhat ridiculous to ask questions like what is real or why is one thing/being/idea valuable and another not? So easy in these moments to emulate a well fed cat ad become concerned only with the sensation of the light warming my skin. Somewhere I imagine I've argued the merits of both simply embracing the sensation and of considering carefully the rational elements of a moment such as this. It seems of late I can find neither the words nor the will to argue either effectively. I am, in short, uninspired. Furthermore, it seems my ever unruly imagination has decided its high time I was once more enthralled by anything and everything well beyond the purview of my current circumstances. I find myself thinking often and fondly of New Zealand.
    I've always been prone to flights of fancy, a bit of balance to the incessant rationality I suppose. But occasionally , like the last few weeks, the distraction of such thoughts rises to a level where all other ventures begin to suffer noticeably as a consequence. It is a contradiction to say that I feel uninspired on the heels of claiming that each moment is its own kind of rare beauty. I suppose the easiest explanation is that the latter is a philosophical admonition concerning the former and represents an ideal I have obviously not attained.

This consideration begins with a thought posited by a famous mathematician, don’t ask me which one at the moment I can’t remember, the meat of it goes something like this; if you take any single combination of elements, a specific license plate in the original example, that is observed in passing, what is the likelihood of that particular arrangement appearing? Typically the answer is extraordinarily small. The more complicated the occurrence the less mathematically probably that outcome will occur. Which leads me to the observation that most of our days are filled with extremely complicated sequences of events that, due to the consistency with which they are accomplished, are given virtually no thought as we pass form moment to moment and event to event.
    The point, I suppose, is that if you rolled a pair of dice once and it came up twelve you might be a little surprised yet if you rolled the same set thirty six times the expectation would be to see that combination at least once. Any observed moment is like that one throw but the rarity of it gets lost in the fog of what we expect. Through this lens the improbable becomes the mundane and the beauty that exists in all these moments we observe, everyday, is lost.
    Like most things these days I’m afraid this piece feels too forced to find the mark for which I was aiming. Perhaps it is a product of the abruptness with which I have experienced the world of late that leads me to this chain of reasoning. Perhaps it is simply one of those rudimentary ideas I should have understood long ago. Likely it is a combination of both, but regardless of why this thought keeps occurring to me. It seems often that what we perceive to be the most mundane of elements, whose frailty we fail to see, become the ones whose beauty we are left to experience only as memories. Lest I stray too far into the realm of clichés my point is that beauty, at least in part, is a product of scarcity. By this reasoning and considering the very small likelihood of any moment occurring just the way we experience it, every moment has a kind of value. Banality is a thing that exists only in the cynical mind.


adendum:
         Having read this several more times I've realized that it is predominently a recrimination directed at my own observable possition of late with a thought that perhaps it would give someone else a moments pause as well.